Toby Muresianu – Comedian

For the record, as an engineer with (an unfortunate amount of) experience with delayed software projects:

Using a “tech surge” to fix the problems with HealthCare.gov is a terrible idea, and every time I read about them “shipping some of the best and brightest minds” to Washington to fix these problems I cringe.

The more significant reason it’s a terrible idea is that you can’t solve software problems by adding more people or money. This is most famously illustrated by tech industry gospel The Mythical Man Month – a book describing the phenomenon of how adding people to a delayed project makes it more delayed.

Basically, what ends up happening is that you pull programmers who are building the product off and have them “bring up to speed” people that have just been brought in. They spend time training them, and then fixing the problems that the new people create, rather than working on the actual delayed product. The more people you add, the more overhead, and the less efficiently the project goes.

That said – I’m sure the experts brought in to fix the problem are aware of this phenomenon – and hopefully will be able to work around it, or maybe it’s all a bunch of hoopla to buy the developers time. At the end of the day – this product is just a website. It should not take that long to build. Obviously there’s important back-end stuff happening, but apparently that’s been functioning okay as the state exchanges have been using it.

You’ll hear excuses like “tech projects are often delayed” and “many websites have glitches” or “the traffic was more than what was estimated.” These are all ridiculous. Yes, tech projects are often delayed and time costs poorly estimated. However, this project is cost $170 million. $170 million. For a website. A website. $170 million. And Sebelius told the Wall Street Journal that ideally they should have had five years to work on the website. If every website took five years and $170 million to develop, there would be like three of them. No, designing an enterprise-class website is not easy, but the truth his that thousands of enterprises do more complicated things every day and manage to pull it off. As did the 14 states that managed to build their exchanges correctly.

People are saying Sebilius should be fired. I don’t know how responsible she is personally or not. It’s so easy to point fingers and I don’t think you should fire people just for vengeance.

I can’t say what the particular causes are – people are citing things like late requirement changes, which are the bane of many a software engineer, but in a well managed project should be prevented from happening.

But at the end of the day people are responsible for this. Anyone who didn’t raise alarm bells at a $170 million price-tag for developing a website should be fired, twice if possible. Obama and Sebilius both should have been told, if they weren’t, about the current status and risk associated with the project before launch and given the chance to delay it; and if they weren’t, whoever was responsible for not telling them should be held responsible. People who are bad at their jobs should not be given the chance to do new ones. I want to say that CGI Federal should not get more government contracts, but regardless after this debacle I’m not sure government agencies will be lining up to get some of that sweet HealthCare.gov magic.

Anyway, just wanted to share some thoughts I had – I had a little time to kill while I was trying to buy health insurance.

So the government shutdown is over, and it’s a relief that the two parties were able to finally come together and agree to do it again in three months. Or maybe not. Maybe they have finally learned that there are limits to what unyielding antagonism can accomplish in a democracy. Or maybe not. Sometimes I wonder if Obama’s alarm clock plays “I got you babe” like in Groundhog Day.

So much has been said about the shutdown and I don’t want to beat a dead horse. I’d just like to express two thoughts:

1. The Republican Party should be two parties. They essentially are (how often does part of one party use the name of a different party to describe itself?) as the two wings represent very different sets of values. It would be great if the debt ceiling debacle yielded a split.

As has been widely reported, one core problem Congress has built for itself is that many of the districts are safe – gerrymandered so that one party has a safe majority, and threats to the incumbent come from within their own party in the primary system, causing the extreme wing to have disproportionate influence. But the will to correct gerrymandered districts hasn’t come from the people in power who drew them that way.

If the Tea Party and Republican party were separate, it could make these existing districts competitive again by allowing moderate Republicans to draw votes from either side in a general election, rather than having to draw them only from one side of their party in a primary. This would benefit democracy in these areas and encourage participation amongst voters who aren’t Republican and currently have no real voice in choosing the representatives of their gerrymandered districts.

2. If no split happens, hopefully this is where the Tea Party jumps the shark (Nominations for the moment? Green Eggs and Ham?). I used to feel like I could at least somewhat where they were coming from from a libertarian perspective even if I didn’t agree with them. But they’re so myopic and melodramatic that their actions aren’t even in line with the values they bluster for days about not compromising.

They hate inefficient government and wasteful spending, so they shut the government down and supported continuing to pay the workers. They believe that the will of the people is being abridged, so they address it by having their small minority dictate the agenda for the vast majority of Americans who voted for non-Tea-Party candidates. Even their core belief in free markets is suspect. To borrow a tweet from Josh Barro: “A conservative is someone who believes all markets are efficient except the bond market.” While it’s a stretch to say conservatives, tea partiers vocally advocate a view that deifies markets and vilifies people in government who think they know better than markets. Yet US Government Bonds have been priced by markets as the safest investment you can make, indicating markets themselves don’t see reason to be concerned about government taking on the debt that Tea Partiers obsess over. So it’s fairly ironic that the Tea Party people in government resolve this conflict by deciding they know better than the markets.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Go back to enjoying your national monuments.

Sometimes when I am working in Europe, I get the chance to perform someplace where people don’t speak English. It’s better than it sounds. English is a close second to Love as the universal language, and there’s enough expats to fill a bar anywhere. This time I ended up doing a night in Budapest, Hungary.

Our first stop was the flat we were staying, which had been booked over an apartment share website (HungAirBnb?). I’d been fretting in my mind whether some material I’d written about the Huns would be relevant, so when the person showing us the apartment’s name was Attila I sighed in relief.

It turns out Hungarians are still proud of the Huns, though most of Europe remembers them for the whole massacring villagers thing, and genetic tests indicate modern Hungarians are less descended from the huns than from those villagers. It’s sort of similar to the relationship Romania has with the Romans – essentially forming your national identity via Stockholm Syndrome.

Attila the Hungarian seemed nice enough – he didn’t trample us under a war horse or anything – though he did try to convince the promoter that the two bedroom apartment the promoter had booked only included the use of one bedroom with two beds on it unless we paid extra. Eventually the promoter convinced him otherwise. Perhaps their time honored practice of extorting tribute has faded into a more gentle haggling.

In any case, the apartment was built during communist times, or at least I hope nobody was paid for making it. Some of the typical Eastern Bloc User Friendliness:

* A shower curtain that curved around a few feet in front of the shower, presumably to hide the view of all the water on the floor.

* A showerhead that did not reach the shower head holder combined with a water heater that didn’t work, so showering was done by holding a showerhead blasting cold water inches from your skin. Though this could have been by design in order to conserve water, or keep it off the floor after they realized where they’d put the shower curtain.

So close, yet so far

* In yet another effort to conserve water, the toilet did not have a bowl full of water and is shaped somewhat like a waterfall. Basically, the way it works is (WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD) your turds drop down onto a flat piece of plastic, where they sit as though on an examination table, instantly filling the adjacent rooms with the unmistakable odor of dry feces. After finishing your business and attempting to flush, a pitiful sound emerges from the device and you are left to stare at your handiwork as it lies like a beached whale with water gently lapping by it like the receding tide. You are then forced to flush dozens of times until the forces of erosion eventually carry the log down the hole like the worlds most disgusting water slide, or use the cleaning brush to speed nature along. Is this too gross for a blog? It was too gross for my life, but it still happened.

The only other noteworthy aspect to the apartment was that like many buildings in Budapest, it was built around a courtyard, though there was only cement at the bottom. It was hard not to imagine people being held over the edge and interrogated Goodfellas-style.

Now do we get to use both bedrooms in the apartment?

After dropping our bags, I headed into town with theÂ opening comedian, Neil Morgan, an Irishman who lives in Brno, Czech Republic. One of the interesting parts of Euro integration is that in addition to Polish people moving to Britain, a lot of Irish and English have moved to places like Brno where multinational tech companies have set up offices and call centers, so that customers in Britain think they are getting local phone support.

Budapest has many attractions, including the largest Synagogue outside of New York:

1% of the Budapest Synagogue

Where to get the chosen information

As well as statues of people on razor scooters being ridden by kids like razor scooters:

Lenin’s first razor scooter

and, of course, Mary Poppins:

Apparently the umbrella took her here.

Budapest has a very familiar, cinematic feel, and for good reason – it has been filmed more than any other city, though typically as a “stand-in” city for others: Paris, Rome, etc. As you walk through the boulevards you almost expect to see flashy car-chases screeching through them, or hear those bank alarms and European police sirens go off right before Jason Statham knocks over your fruit stand. No such luck on our trip, though.

On a previous tour of central Europe, I’d met Dave Thompson, a wonderful British comedian who played Tinky Winky on the Teletubbies and wrote a book called “The Sex Life of a Comedian,” presumably because it was a less creepy title than “The Sex Life of a Teletubby.” He had settled in Budapest because he claimed that Hungarian women were the most beautiful in the world. While usually this is just local pride in this case I couldn’t help but notice (I’m not made of stone) that women were consistently extremely beautiful; I would place it as city with the fifth most beautiful women I’ve seen, after New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and if you are a girl, whatever city you live in (so smooth).

Even more than the architecture or the women, though, I found myself most attracted to the beauty of the exchange rates (I am made of Jew). An overstuffed falafel sandwich will run you the equivalent of $2 including tax. On the other hand, all the food I had was pretty bad, but that may be more a result of me frequenting $2 kebab places than anything.

After about two hours of walking around, it was time for the show. In the upstairs showroom, we played to a mostly full crowdÂ of about 50 people; summers tend to dent comedy turnouts in any language. Unlike other shows I’ve done in Europe, they were mostly locals, with a few expats and a couple Romanians who came out because they recognized my name as Romanian. Someday I hope people will recognize my name as my name rather than simply belonging to my ethnicity, but since it’s more common for people to recognize my name as simply a jumble of vowels that they have no idea how to pronounce I’ll take whatever I can get.

The show was very fun, and unusual in that there was a guest set before my performance by an opera singer, who ended up being a bit late to the show as he had just won a chess tournament down the road. It was also the first time I shared the stage with someone’s puppy who wandered across the stage; her lack of stage fright at such a young age was pretty remarkable and I see stardom in her future. It was the happiest I’ve ever been to have someone come up on stage, and it didn’t distract from the show at all; if YouTube has taught us anything, it’s that people pay more attention to anything there are puppies involved in.

After the show, we went out to a “ruin pub”, a phenomenon unique to Budapest. After the fall of the socialist state, there were a bunch of buildings with courtyards that were derelict and owned by the state. The fall of the socialism coinciding with strong demand for alcohol, a few entrepreneurs starting putting bars in abandoned courtyards, graffitiing them up, and staying one step ahead of the police until they made enough money to buy the buildings outright. Tragically, after feeling like very saavy authentic tourists it turned out we were in a faux-ruin-pub just built to look like one – the Hungarian club equivalent of buying pre-distressed jeans. You can’t win em all, but on the plus side, their bathroom was light years better than I (shudder to) imagine authentic ones would be.

After many shots of Palinka (Hungary’s local hard liquor or cough syrup, I wasn’t sure) it was time to pass out in our pleasantly separate bedrooms, though only after setting our alarms for a horribly early hour to take the train to Neil’s adopted hometown of Brno. Would have liked to spend more time in Budapest and have my fingers crossed I’ll return there to do a show (or open for an opera singer) soon.

It’s nice how people come together and show support on social networks in the wake of a tragedy like the one that happened in Boston. When your faith in the world is shaken, it is nice to see a lot of people post messages of hope and positivity. It’s easy to say it’s just a Facebook message, but it does have an emotional impact.

There were also a few people who posted messages that pointed out that there were tragedies going on all over the world, and that Boston’s wasn’t special. Examples:

“oh my god! horrible tragedy today. my thoughts go out to the 25,000 people who died of starvation around the world.”

“This really isn’t to cause shit, what happened in Boston is terrible, but would just like to put things in perspective. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2013/apr/15/syria-conflict-shelling-in-damascus-suburbs-live-updates”

“Americans are so vain. The people in Boston now might know what it’s like to live in Iraq, or Niger or any other unprivileged place…”

If you didn’t see anyone who posted something like this, congratulations, you have better friends than I do.

But it would be disingenuous to write it off; I’ll admit I have instinctively thought it about other tragedies with small casualty figures. When you are used to seeing news articles like “30 dead, 200 injured in Peshawar” is it just egotism that makes us care so much about 3 people dying and 100 or so being injured in one of our cities?

I think there’s a few reasons why it’s not.

First, I think it’s natural to feel more intensely about places to which you have a connection – whether having visited, lived there, studied there, or have friends or relatives living there – and Boston is a city many people have such a connection to. Is it analytically wrong to care more about things you are closer to? Maybe, but you also have more ability to help them, and humans are emotional beings. We feel worse about our friends dying than about two strangers dying half a world away – and that’s true of all people whether they live in the US, Canada or Peshawar.

Second, caring is not a zero sum game. We can care about Boston and care about the third world as well, and despite the stereotypes, many Americans do. it’s particularly silly to imply otherwise when the event in question was a marathon that many people run for charity, which draws participants from all over the world, and is held in Boston – one of the most educated and liberal (if that matters to you) cities anywhere.

Another reason we take Boston more personally because it is more of an attack on us personally. Whoever did it wanted to target people simply because they were there. If I’d been standing next to that garbage can (as I may have many times, having grown up there) they would have been just as happy to have killed me – forgive me if I find that particularly disturbing. I don’t know if there were bombs going off in their neighborhoods whether these posters would be strolling around saying “well, this is nothing compared to the situation in the Central African Republic,” but I suspect not.

Nobody is saying that violence in the third world is less terrible than violence here. All I’m saying is that the reason we are more upset about it right now is completely normal and to imply that it’s due to being egotistical or use it to confirm your pre-existing anti-Americanism is ridiculous.

And what are those posters complaining about exactly? Are they angry that the Boston story is getting front page coverage rather than other conflicts? If so, I’d like to remind them that the Syrian conflict is 2 years old, and ask what paper have they been looking at where it has not consistently been on the front page since then — as well as what world it was published in.

Are they angry that people are posting messages of support on Facebook for Boston rather than the third world today? It’s worth noting that a) they’re not generally posting daily messages of support for the third world, either and b) when events in Syria, Iraq, etc. first happened, many of the same people posting about Boston now were posting messages of support for them, too.

What particularly irks me is how often people who post this stuff act like they are big thinkers for it. They aren’t being thoughtful. They are using knee-jerk anti-Americanism as a substitute for intellectualism, and trying to show off that they read the news as though nobody else possibly could. I don’t mean to start anything. I’d just like to, you know, put things in perspective.

The government of Mohamed Morsi is moving to arrest one of its prominent critics – Bassem Youssef, a former doctor and now television personality who models his show after the Daily Show, which you may have seen him on.

Al Jazeera reports:

Youssef said he would hand himself over on Sunday, “unless they kindly send a police van today and save me the transportation hassle”

As a (sometimes) political comedian, I wish I had those kind of guts. It’s a reminder that as much as we as Americans revere people like Lenny Bruce, there are still comedians making sacrifices as great or greater than him today.

While Youssef obviously performs in Arabic, I was able to find a subtitled version of his show. While watching it, you notice a few things:

Even in translation it’s surprisingly funny (though of course there’s some Egyptian references you may not get)

You feel much more of connection to Egyptians than by reading banal news reports, and

He really does look like John Stewart.

Hopefully through this ordeal he’s able to draw more attention to the ridiculousness of those in power.

I support gay marriage. I think it should be legal, and I hope the supreme court rules in favor of it. But people have taken to calling it a human rights issue, and it’s not.

Human rights are fundamental rights we all deserve simply for being human. Timeless, fundamental freedoms like the ability to speak your mind, worship whatever god you choose, or have children. Let’s not forget that gay marriage only became an issue after Bush made it one. Is it really a human right if nobody even thought about it until 15 years ago?

But isn’t being able to marry the person you love a fundamental human right? Sure. But gay people can already get married, and have for decades. Here’s how: by saying they were married. Nobody will stop you. That’s all it takes to be married in the eyes of your god or if you’re an athiest like me, in the eyes of each other – which is the most important thing.

What we’re talking about is the right to have your state use the word “marriage” to describe your partnership, and in some cases (though not California’s) having the commensurate tax advantages and benefits like visitation rights in the hospital. Which, again, I completely support. I just don’t think it’s a human rights issue.

But isn’t equality a human right? Shouldn’t the state treat everyone equally?

If I were disabled, I would get money from the state. There are many ways in which it treats people unequally.

Most directly, I’m single and while I’d love to have a long term relationship, I don’t believe in marriage. If I have a 15 year relationship with a girlfriend, we don’t get the rights of a married couple. Doesn’t it make me unequal in the eyes of the state because religiously based legislation deems our lifestyle less valid? Sure, I could see it that way. But to say I felt my human rights are being violated would trivialize the term by equating it to violent religious persecution in Syria or detentions in Tiananmen Square. It would be part of a broader trend where people claim things like anti-Semitism, racism or class warfare at slight provocations because they feel it lends legitimacy to their argument. But really they just water down the terms and fan the flames of passion that have caused our political debates to become so divisive.

This isn’t a post about terminology. It’s about how to have a productive conversation. If our conversation becomes not about “human rights” but instead a conversation about the merits of tax benefits for married couples regardless of sexual orientation, maybe we would end with a superior and fairer solution for everyone. For example, abolishing tax benefits for all married couples because they don’t actually make sense. And rather than have visitation rights be restricted to a spouse of any gender, simply allowing me to specify which people who can visit me in the hospital, be they my gay spouse, girlfriend, lawyer or golfing buddy. And when benefits are equalized, we might see that whatever word a bunch of silly voters decide your state should use to call your partnership has zero effect on your life or what word you use, so it isn’t worth wasting your breath on when there are so many larger challenges to confront.

If you want to disagree with me about this being the best way to run things, sure, we can have that conversation. I just promise not to say it’s one about human rights.

Many people have commented that American politicians are acting like fighting children. It does feel similar.

“Johnny doesn’t pay enough taxes!” “Barry’s being greedy!”

Eventually, most parents in that situation would snap, and arrive at the same solution:

“If you don’t learn to cooperate, nobody gets what they want!”

“But that’s not fair!” both children would reply.

Sometimes, though, fair doesn’t matter.

The difficulty of cutting things has become a key problem with our democracy. If you propose to cut one program, its patrons line up to defend it and point fingers at other people’s wasteful programs. And it works – cuts are often avoided.

In cognitive psychology you often hear the term “losses loom larger than gains”. People are much more averse to parting what they already have than they are to gaining something of equivalent value. For example, if you offer to sell someone a coffee cup, they won’t be willing to buy it for more than a dollar or two. But give them the same coffee cup and a week later offer to buy the same cup back, and they won’t part with it for less than five or six.

While people know we need to make big cuts in general, the cost of fighting over specific cuts is too great to make whittling down to a budget a good approach. A better way is to make larger general cuts that people agree to in principle and then add back what you really need. If we’re going to endlessly argue about our national priorities, let’s do it from a position of fiscal solvency first.

It’s also telling that the cuts are not always as dire as we imagine that as soon as losses in funding become a reality, the heads of the programs change their tune from defending all their programs to prioritization.

“That’s not fair,” says the military. “We are risking American lives. We should be cutting low-value, expensive programs instead.”

Where were these low-value, expensive programs during previous budget discussions?

“This is ridiculous!” say social programs. “We have to furlough all our employees instead of just laying off underperforming and inefficient ones!”

Why did you have underperforming, inefficient employees still working there?

“The timing of the cuts is terrible!” say various sources.

But has there ever been a time that people described as good for cuts?

Much is being said about how this is a self-inflicted wound. Let’s not ignore the biggest self-inflicted wound – the much harder eventual economic collapse that results after years of spiraling deficits.

Every time there’s an economic crisis – take the housing crisis, for example – people afterwards ask “how could the people in charge not have seen this coming?”. And when you look closer, you find people who thought things like “it’ll be fine” or “we’re different” or looked the other way because they were benefiting financially and it was easier to keep doing what they were doing. The national debt is a crisis everyone sees coming, but nobody’s done anything about, and there’s no shortage of people saying “it’ll be fine” because – well – we’re all benefitting financially and it’s easier to keep doing what we’re doing than bear psychologically painful short term cuts.

But no matter how politicians spin it or explain that the US is different, when political expedience runs into the brick wall of economic truth, economics will win every time. Spending far beyond your means for years catches up with everyone eventually, and we are no exception.

The sequester is tough medicine. But let’s not forget that the scale of the cuts is not massive – it’s a reasonable cut in the overall budget. Now there are petitions for programs being cut to be allowed to adjust how they want the cuts to be made – I hope these bear fruit. But either way, hopefully it will be a wake up call to politicians and programs to make more intelligent sacrifices earlier, because they know that if they act like children forever, nobody – including them – will get what they want.

The other week, I wrote a post suggesting measures to make schools safer that could be agreed on without politics.

They were having armed guards in schools, and reducing violence in the media.

It didn’t turn out exactly how I’d hoped.

A few days later, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre gave a press conference where he called for armed guards in schools, and blamed the media for violence.

There was a minor backlash.

It was funny – I actually thought I was being apolitical, and nobody had accused me of being a gun nut (which I’m not; I support gun control). Was I way off base? Or were liberals vilifying the NRA, cause, well, it’s the NRA and they’re villain-y?

It would be easy to create a laundry list of how crazy and hypocritical the NRA is, and many people have.

They deride politics when they are political lobbyists. They criticize the media for dramatizing violence, then create a fear-driven narrative of a world populated by monsters who can only be stopped by “good guys with guns” – a narrative which draws more from Dirty Harry and email forwards than reality. They have zero self-awareness over the fact that someone who believed everything they said was killed by the guns she loved and enabled the entire massacre.

But packaged in the basket of crazy are a few perfectly legitimate points. Maybe they stumbled upon them by accident, and it would be easy to write them off. But if our goal is to genuinely protect kids and not just win an argument, we shouldn’t.

1) The media doesn’t know anything about guns.

I would expand the media to include “most people on facebook and twitter.” All abound with confusion over what terms like semi-automatic or .223 mean, or feature calls to ban “military-style assault rifles” – a vague and unhelpful term. As one relative put it, “is it okay to have non-military style assault rifles?”. Even the legal definition of “assault rifle” includes characteristics like bayonet lugs and pistol grips, which do nothing to affect their deadliness – barring any recent mass bayonetings or pistol whippings I’m unaware of.

It’s hard to imagine an effective weapons ban when the people advocating it don’t understand what weapons they want to ban. This was the case with the previous ban, and the result was that dangerous-sounding guns such as the AK-47 were banned, but guns like the WASR-10, which is a type of AK-47, weren’t.

Good thing this isn’t an AK-47, those things are dangerous

For the record – “semi-automatic” basically means it fires once every time you pull the trigger. Automatic weapons (meaning they fire three times when you pull the trigger, or continuously if you hold down the trigger) have been restricted to police/military use for years. .223 is a common size of ammunition used in everything from hunting rifles to military ones. If there’s one topic we should bring ourselves to admit the NRA knows more about than liberals, it’s how guns work.

And the practical definition of assault rifle for the purposes of a new ban that restricted the most dangerous class of weapons should be “a semi-automatic rifle with a high capacity magazine”.

2) The media – including video games – encourage violence.

Obviously, it doesn’t do so to a dangerous extent with the overall population, but for a vulnerable, alienated segment of the population violent media and video games are dangerous. Just like, you might say, guns.

Again, nobody has actually suggested ways for reforming the media, and I believe it’s irresponsible to point the finger at them without recognizing the role we all play in supporting it. Also, we have a thing called a first amendment. If there is to be a change in the culture or the media, it won’t come from legislation; it has to come from us as individuals avoiding gratuitously violent media and creating an environment in which it is no longer socially acceptable.

3) Armed guards are the only preventative measure that will take effect right now.

Nobody disputes that gun control legislation will take months and guns will still be circulating for years. Better mental health care will be a long time coming as well, will not fix people who are crazy right now, and will not ensure at any point that people with mental health problems use it.

I’m hearing two common arguments against security guards in schools.

a) There was a security guard at Columbine, and he didn’t do anything!

This is true. He fired at the attackers from 60 yards away (a laughable distance with a handgun), got shot at, retreated and called police. Here’s why: he was a shitty security guard.

I hate that the gun control debate is so driven by anecdotes – whether it’s the Columbine example or gun rights advocates bringing up one-off cases of a grandmother killing a mugger – which don’t exemplify what happens in most cases. This is a big country, and everything is going to happen a certain amount of times.

Someday, I would like to hear gun rights and gun control avocates argue about how to play roulette. “You know, in this one case, Jane Harrison placed her money on 32 black and won. Would you have had her not win that jackpot?”

b) It’s not right for teachers to have guns! We need less guns, not more!

I dislike this argument because it’s purely emotional reasoning. A related argument is that armed guards “send the wrong message about the role of a school,” which smacks of “it does not fit my mental image of the school I went into, so therefore it is wrong.” Would people saying this also argue that in the 1/3 of American schools that already have armed security, those personnel should be taken away?

Also, nobody is suggesting all teachers be issued handguns. But if a teacher has completed training and wishes for their own safety and that of their kids to have, say, a handgun locked in their drawer or in the principal’s office, is it really helpful to tell them that they can’t? When did teachers go from being saints who could do no wrong and always deserved to be paid more to authority figures who couldn’t be trusted with such decisions?

On the other hand, there is one great argument for not having guns in schools – we don’t need it. This argument comes courtesy of Josh Barro at Bloomberg, who points out that schools are still overall the safest place for our children to be (though I do disagree with his arguments that guns “sending the wrong message on education” for the reasons above).

It’s surprising this argument isn’t made more, but after a catastrophe the pressure is so strong to “do something” that sometimes it’s hard to make the case that we don’t need to.

On the other hand – there is a good argument for armed guards even if they are not cost-effective. As with terrorism, the damage done by school shootings isn’t in terms of casualty numbers alone. The damage is largely mental – in the national anguish and atmosphere of fear it can create.

We need to balance the pain of not having an armed guard there to defend against the next school shooting (which will happen, at some point, even if it is hopefully later due to gun control or other means) against the savings of not having them there. The side consequences and benefits of gun-related accidents and prevention of other crimes should also be in the equation.

Considering those things and determining the right thing to do is a difficult question. But it is an honest one, as opposed to slogans or blanket arguments which do not alleviate the problem.

It’s my personally still my belief that we should encourage guards in schools – because when the next shooting occurs, we will either stop it, or be able to say we did all we could to – even if it wasn’t our idea.

Here’s my present to all of you. It’s a song parody I wrote of Jingle Bell Rock about the Fiscal Cliff. My friend Adam Campbell-Schmitt is the one singing, not me, so please give him the rock star treatment (quitting your job to follow him around, stalking him incessantly, etc) and not me.

But if our goal is to help prevent loss of life in the future, let’s not assume the only path to safety is to lobby our politicians to a) ban guns or b) have them distributed free with happy meals (depending on your political beliefs). Our politicians are terrible at enacting any legislation, let alone something as difficult or inundated with lobbyists as gun control.

There are two things we can do right now.

First, at the school level, let’s train teachers how to respond and have a security guard (or two) in our schools.

It’s crazy to think that unrestricted access to arms will turn citizens into Dirty Harry instantly when the time comes with no ill effects. Yet it’s also crazy to think the danger will disappear in the near term if we restrict gun sales or improve mental health care. Fortunately, these aren’t the only options – nobody disputes that armed, professional security personnel can help provide security where we need it. Having an officer in schools accomplishes three things:

– It deters people from attacking to begin with. Shooters don’t pick areas full of defenseless civilians because they want a fight.

– It stops or at least slows down attacks when they do occur.

– It makes people feel safe day to day.

Obviously, cost is an issue. But at smaller schools it’s possible this role could by fulfilled by training a few teachers to fill this role. And in any case, it seems a bit disingenuous to cry that we have to do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t happen, then balk at paying for a single security guard at a school with a few dozen teachers and a few hundred students.

My second idea is one which you can put into action right now, today, without relying on anyone and no matter what your political beliefs.

Here’s the thing – I don’t think that news organizations are not trying to be evil. They just broadcast things because we watch them. How can we blame them for what they show when we’re the ones making it profitable?

Something one gun-rights advocate said stuck with me. He said they had all the same guns in the 70s, but they never had mass shootings, so it was a cultural problem. While I don’t think that reduces the need for gun control, I do agree that the increase in mass shootings has something to do with our culture of escalation and prizing fame as the ultimate measure of success. Unfortunately, nobody can change our culture – not the government, not any one person. In cliched terms, it can only be changed by you.

When an event like this happens, don’t read salacious news articles or watch excessive news coverage. Don’t reward reporters that interview 3rd graders or bother families. Now, it’s a fine line between being informed and being voyeuristic. But look within yourself, and if you don’t need to read an extra dozen articles or watch an episode of 20/20 about the shooter’s life, don’t. Let’s make watching news that sensationalizes shooters a faux paux, as we should for “journalism” that explores the lurid details of child molestation, rape, and murder. The lower the viewership of these programs, the fewer will air, and we will in some small way reduce the incentives for sick individuals to seek out this notoriety.